Patch 1.05 Detailed (Out Thursday)

http://blog.bioware.com/2017/04/04/mass-effect-andromeda-patch-1-05-notes/

Patch 1.05 Notes

Improved tutorial placement

Single player balance changes: Ammo crates, armor, weapons, nomad, profiles, attacks, and progression

Multiplayer balance changes: Weapons, cover, and enemies (check back for detailed notes on balance changes)

Added option to skip autopilot sequences in the galaxy map

Improved logic, timing, and continuity for relationships and story arcs

Improved lip-sync and facial acting during conversations, including localized VO

Fixed various collision issues

Fixed bugs where music or VO wouldn’t play or wasn’t correct

Fixed issue where global squad mate banter sometimes wasn’t firing on UNCs

Fixed issue where player was unable to access the Remnant Console Interface after failing decryption multiple times

Fixed issue where fast travel is sometimes disabled after recruiting Drack until the player reloads a save

Fixed issue where Ryder can become stuck in the start of Biotic Charge Pose

Fixes issues related to some saves

Fixed issue where objective sometimes becomes un-interactable for players in multiplayer

Streaming and stability improvements

Thank god you can skip the planet loading animation now. I'm still probably going to wait for a sale to pick this one up (if at all)...

It's out Thursday, according to them. Not yet. All this stuff sounds good, and their changes in the next few months sounds good but it's a really long time to wait since I'm halfway through already.

Sounds good but Persona is here now.

The ability to skip the whole autopilot thing makes me so very excited. I wouldn't have minded it if it was maybe jus between galaxies cause it's kind of s cool affect but every single planet is ridiculous

Yep. I'm excited and I'll try it when it comes out; too bad I already put 100 hours in and finished everything aside from a few task missions.

---

"Hi everyone,

It’s been two weeks since the launch of Mass Effect™: Andromeda and we’re thankful to the millions of you who have already joined us on this journey. And though the game is now in your hands, it’s really just the beginning.

Since launch, our team has been poring over your comments and feedback, looking to discover what you like about the game, as well as areas we can evolve or improve.

This Thursday, we’ll release a new patch that addresses technical fixes (crashes, improved performance), but also adds a number of improvements we’ve heard you ask for, such as:

• Allowing you to skip ahead when travelling between planets in the galaxy map
• Increasing the inventory limits
• Improving the appearance of eyes for humans and asari characters
• Decreasing the cost of remnant decryption keys and making them more accessible at merchants
• Improving localized voice over lip sync
• Fixing Ryder’s movements when running in a zig zag pattern
• Improving matchmaking and latency in multiplayer

There are many more adjustments being made, all of which you can find in our patch notes.

Over the next two months we’ll be rolling out additional patches which will go even deeper and look to improve several areas of the game:

• More options and variety in the character creator
• Improvements to hair and general appearance for characters
• Ongoing improvements to cinematic scenes and animations
• Improvements to male romance options for Scott Ryder
• Adjustments to conversations with Hainly Abrams

These upcoming patches will also address performance and stability issues. And we’re looking at adding more cosmetic items to single player for free.

For multiplayer, over the same timeframe, we’re going to continue to build on the APEX missions that have been running since launch. We’ll be adding new maps, characters, and weapons. On Thursday, we kick off the first of three new chapters centered around The Remnant Investigation.

This is just a taste of what’s in store as we continue to support Mass Effect: Andromeda. And as always, you all play an important role in that. We want to hear from you about your experiences, both what you love about the game and what you’d like to see changed. We’re listening, and we’re committed to partnering with you as we continue to explore the Andromeda galaxy together.

Here’s to a great journey,

Aaryn"

@efesell: very true. Gonna put this game on the back burner until I finish Zelda and Persona. By that time I hope a few more patches hit and make the game even better. I've had some bugs on the pc version but more inconvenient than game breaking. In a few months a look forward to coming back to it

@ntm: This is exactly why I'll wait till the GOTY edition is out and on sale and I'm sure I'll not only have a decent time with it but will arguably get a better experience than people who bought it at launch.

I'm still waiting on a PC patch for Automata and I'm on my second playthrough.

This is a serious problem with modern releases, especially western releases (Japanese games have tended to launch more finished and receive less post-launch tinkering, with FF XV being a notable exception.) The message is "Buy and play this game for full price now! It will be much better in 6 months!" It's total bullshit. I'm not saying they shouldn't fix bugs and the like, but design choices like inventory size and skippable cut-scenes should be fixed and locked in before launch.

@humanity: Will there be a game of the year edition, though? I enjoyed the game quite a bit as it was, but these are definitely welcome improvements. Waiting a while is a good idea.

@bigsocrates: Totally agree. It sometimes seems like they're still working on their games after release but are forced to put it out early. Some of these things (like not being able to skip from planet-to-planet on a whim) seems like they legitimately thought it was a good idea, but all the glitches or bad facial expressions and what have you, it seem like they were forced to put it out early in my opinion. Can we all just blame EA on his one again? :P Ha ha, no. I don't know.

@alistercat: Whoops, I skipped over that in the blog post. I've changed the title to reflect that.

Obligatory "when do they patch in the fun?" snark.

Really though, this is too little, too late. I'll be nearly done by Thursday and certainly complete by the time the game is patched to a reasonable state two months from now. Plus, even if they fix the facial animations, dialogue timing, crashes, t-poses and everything else, there's no patch to make a sadly boring story and world more interesting.

I've got seriously mixed feelings about it. I can understand the attitude of "EA shouldn't force things to be released before they're ready," but at the same time, this seems more like a problem of scope and overall lack of skill/talent than anything else. I mean, this doesn't seem like a Dragon Age II "get it done in 12 months - or else." sort of situation. They've had five years to work on this. At a certain point, it must become obvious that you've bitten off more than you can chew and need to walk back the scope of the game a little bit to be manageable. As much as I can understand wanting to chase the Witcher 3, that game also had about twice the budget. Half the budget should mean half the scope. Instead we got the same sized game at 1/2 the quality.

I'd be very interested to know about the behind the scenes on this one. There are rumors of inter-studio hostility between Edmonton and Montreal. Did that fuck things up? Overconfidence on Montreal's part? Was "we got this" a literal development mantra? Did EA constantly require more to be done? A combination of those?

A lot of lessons to carry forward with this one. Unfortunately, BioWare seems to be a studio that stubbornly refuses to learn them.

I'm glad they are fixing some stuff, though It's too late for me and it won't fix the underlining major issues that make the game so mediocre, but if any of these fixes/improvements improve the experience for someone else down the line, they are worth it.

@ntm: I'm sure they have DLC plans and Inquisition had story DLC so if this is using that same framework then they'll probably have some as well. A GOTY version is always a good way to drum up some more sales.

I'm just about done with the game, with ~100 hours into it. Might be a year before I get back into it, will be interesting to see how much changes in that time - the patch notes *look* good, at least.

I'm only about 10 hours into the game, so I think I'll put it on hold. Seems like I would be doing myself a huge disfavor if I keep playing.

Very happy to see the skip travel sequence but i really want to see what type of balance changes they are making for multiplayer.

Seems like my strategy of 'waiting until the game is fixed before playing it' is slowly but surely working out.

Here's to hoping weapons that aren't Black Widow/Vanquisher/N7 Valiant will be useful in multiplayer in difficulties that aren't bronze.

When they had an announcement about their announcement I was expecting more than this. These patch notes and future plans are pretty underwhelming. "In the next two months we're going to be making improvements to the hair!" Yay?

At least they're working on it, I guess.

@humanity: I guess I thought of it is as literally game of the year. I thought, instead of just it getting praise and with critics quotes put on a box, I'd think it'd need an actual GOTY award to get an edition. I guess not. It's just a name, that's stupid. Anyways, yeah, in that case there very well could be a 'game of the year' edition. I said it because I don't think there'll be a lot of game of the year awards this game's getting.

If they waited a couple more weeks instead of putting it out before the end of the fiscal year it might have made a big difference to their review scores if these changes are as good as they sound.

It would still be a bad Mass Effect but it could have gotten more praise as a direct to video ME.

Don't really understand why they had to rush it out, probably lost money doing it.

But will her face still be tired?

@ntm: thank you for posting this. According to some gb dudes I'm about half way through the game and I think at a really good stopping point story wise. This made my decision much easier to just wait until I beat Zelda and Persona to finish this game.

@ntm: Yah at this point I think GOTY is just a term used for a bundle. Inquisition had a GOTY edition and I don't think that game reviewed incredibly high either. (still a fun game)

Inquisition reviewed pretty well (mid to high 80s on metacritic depending on the version). Also, it won GOTY from the Keighleys (The Game Awards). That's pretty much the most high profile game of the year award there is.

@ll_exile_ll: Oh then who knows? I always assumed it was just a bundle name at this point but maybe you do need to actually win some GOTY award to get that prestigious title.

You definitely don`t need to win anything to put GOTY on the box. Bloodborne released a GOTY version of the game in November the same year the game was released. I guess they could safely presume that the game would win some GOTY awards (I don`t know if it did, but it certainly deserved to), but they hadn`t won anything by the time the bundle was released.

@humanity: I liked Dragon Age Inquisition a lot. If the game had better side content (which is the issue with this game) I would probably consider it as good as The Witcher 3. Heck, I don't even like saying I like one or the other more, but just being realistic about how I feel I'd say The Witcher 3 is a bit better to me. I love Dragon Age and Inquisition topped even Origins in my opinion. Two is good mainly because the characters are really likable to me, and combat is faster paced which I didn't mind. That all said, I am a bigger fan of Mass Effect for sure mainly because I am more into sci-fi than fantasy, but Inquisition is a better game than Andromeda I think overall. Eh, I'm just kind of rambling. What I wanted to say is that no, actually Inquisition rated really well (which now I read is already stated), 85 - 89 on Metacritic, and it did win awards. Even on GameSpot, they gave Shadow of Mordor game of the year over Dragon Age because they said it was simply a newer experience, otherwise, Inquisition would have won. My assumption of how game of the year editions works is wrong I now believe.

Edit - It's possible that it doesn't necessarily need the game of the year award, but some sort of accolade instead of just praise. I mean, that makes sense. I've never seen a game that scored terribly with only several good reviews toward the game, and then there was game of the year edition out of it, otherwise you'd think every developer would try to put that kind of thing out. It's also possible that a nomination would be good enough to warrant it. I don't know.

I'm happy I'm waiting for a sale on this. I have a feeling by summer time this game will be technically much better. I'm not saying it won't still have obvious issues, but I think some of that is relative to how much of the same stuff you didn't mind in the original Mass Effect trilogy. One thing that always gets me is people ripping on the romance scenes, not just the animations but the "low quality" of how hokey they felt. I feel like people saying that either are mis-remembering or totally didn't play the original Mass Effect trilogy. The romance scenes in all those games were just as hokey haha.

Anyway, I'm happy to leave this on the back burner, and like a lot of big AAA releases, becomes a better performing game later in't is life cycle. And while I"m not saying that makes that "acceptable" at the same time enough games launch broken that this is a thing that I think all of us can realize we've been dealing with for years now. How many games end up being much more playable and worth it 6 months or a year after release? Besides there is enough quality titles what with Zelda, Horizon, Persona, to sink teeth into now that saving this for a slower summer month when it'll probably even be cheaper and more in line with price for quality actually makes sense.

Hunh. Well, guess I'll hold off continuing, and possibly restart, my campaign playthrough. I'd prefer to continue it, but if they're gonna move around story stuff (even if it's just romance shit) I'd prefer to start over. Same goes for more customization options. What a pain.

@odinsmana That was called the Old Hunters edition though, right?

It's nice that they're adding a skip for the ridiculously long flight times. Something like that SHOULD HAVE BEEN IN THE GAME FROM THE FREAKING START.

The rest of the changes are pretty nice though, I'm putting ME:A on hold while I play through Persona 5 and Dark Souls 3, so when I come back, hopefully a few more of these patches will come through and the game will be much better as a result.

i think this will get to a better place eventually, though the damage is done. persona 5's alright i guess.

I wonder if this means they've changed the "GET ALL QUEST PROGRESSION FOR EVERYONE ONCE YOU GET TO KADARA 500 EMAILS IN YOUR INBOX! READ NOW" issue. They wrote the unveiling of Kadara into a story mission but then made majority of the major side quests reliant on it so everything just gets dumped on you at once.

This "they took five years" argument needs to go the way of the dodo. That would mean pre-production took place during Mass Effect 3's development which I call bullshit on. Remember the first 2 teasers of Andromeda? One was a dev diary and the other was a CG trailer of maps. There's no way this game was being worked on fully until at least 2014 or early 2015. This game was coming in hot and I guess pre-orders were strong so EA released it anyway.

No. In Europe at least it was called GOTY edition. I remember it clearly because it was so dumb.

https://blog.eu.playstation.com/2015/10/13/bloodborne-game-of-the-year-edition-launches-on-25th-november/

What time are patches released on PS4?

@aesthetic_noise: assuming they are releasing at the same time, in about an hour. Bioware hasn't made it clear if the patch is going to everyone yet though.

Also, the lack of details on balance changes has me worried atm, if they aren't putting 100% effort into those i would rather they wait and do it separate.

LOL to the multiplayer updates. They made it harder mostly? Sounds unnecessary. At least some weapons seem a bit better like they should be.

My turret doesn't even work in multiplayer unless I host the game and I don't see any mention of that.

I'm backtracking on my "never playing this" idea. I'll play this sometime in 2018 when they've done everything they'll do to this game to see it for what it is and probably still be disappointed, but I have to see it.

just downloaded a 1gig patch, so it seems like they put in some work.. maybe...

Seems like that's probably right though? Starting after DA:O, Bioware has always started on the next game before the current one is done AFAIK. Although it depends on how you define a game's work as "starting"...they were probably working on/learning the new engine 5 years ago.

@marz: Eyeball fixes alone make me happy. Seems like they tweaked the skin shader too. Less subsurface scattering or whatever Frostbyte's approximation of it is, so they look less like wax.

Maybe it's a placebo effect, but the lip sync does seem much better. Not perfect, but no game like this is. Color me impressed.

Wow. It's like someone at BioWare actually bothered to look at a picture of a human being.

Looks better but she looks so angry now lol

@artisanbreads: what has changed so far? It was difficult enough imo, they should focus on making all weapons/classes viable at all difficulties and make combos useful.

When you are a large company you need your team always working on something. If you have concept artists that are just sitting around while a game is in crunch time then why bother keep them around? It's why you'll hear stories of DLC be created after a game gets feature locked.

I will say the update does make conversations look better.